The love story of a Welsh doctor and a nurse, who served in some of the most harrowing battlefields of the Second World War, has emerged after secret war diaries were discovered.

Jeaf Brewer was a 24-year-old doctor fresh from medical school in Cardiff when he left Wales in 1941 to join the Eight Army in the deserts near Cairo.

Travelling in the same convoy was newly qualified nurse Joan Lockyer from Cornwall. In her bag were two tiny notebooks on which she was to record the dramatic events of the next few years of their war in the desert.

Joan, who married Jeaf three years later, secretly kept diaries throughout the war, an act that was strictly prohibited incase the papers fell into enemy hands.

The tiny two inch by 2.5 inch diaries, discovered gathering dust on top of a wardrobe, paint a vivid picture of danger, courage, love and adventure for medical crews in the North African and Italian campaigns.

During four years of war service Jeaf, one of four children born in Tonyrefail to Dr Lesley Brewer and his wife Lysbeth, lived in army tents in the North African desert. With scant supplies and no sanitation he, Joan and the rest of the medical crew treated disease and terrible injuries.

But the diaries reveal it was a life of contradictions as war forced the Porth Grammar School boy and his future wife to enjoy life when they could. Dealing with death, exhaustion, homesickness and heartbreak Joan also recorded the couple’s excitement, exotic foreign travel, freedom from conventions previously unimaginable, love and the heightened emotions of wartime romance.

The campaigns in North Africa, Sicily and Italy where they tended to the sick and injured, are less known than those in Northern Europe, but were crucial to the outcome of the war. Huge numbers of personnel and resources were involved, fighting first in deserts, then in the mountains of Italy.

Joan on Night duty 1945

As well as battle injuries, they cared for soldiers suffering malaria, dysentery, typhoid, jaundice, sand-fly fever and even occasionally smallpox, diphtheria and polio. At times, more soldiers died of malaria than from war injuries, the diaries show.

When Joan was called up for war service she was warned keeping diaries was not permitted so bought the smallest ones she could find and hid them in her bags as she left in a convoy of ships for Egypt - little thinking her daughter would find them 60 years later.

Within days of arriving in Egypt in 1941 Joan was nursing soldiers in the army field hospital near Cairo secretly recording the heat, sights, people and food of the desert.

She carried on writing in September that year when she fell sick with malaria, typhoid and dysentery. Logged on the ‘dangerously ill list’ she recovered to be sent back to the frontline and later that year worked close to the battle of El Alamein as fighting moving back and forth across the border of Libya and Egypt.

On leave the following year the adventurous young nurse hitched a lift on an American plane to Dubai, Baghdad, Sharjah and Habbassiya, returning via Tel Aviv and Beirut and on to the front line in Sicily where fighting was intense and there were thousands of malaria cases.

It was in Italy that Joan became truly close to Jeaf and they married in Perugia, in 1944, followed by a two-week honeymoon in Rome.

By then the campaign for Cassino, which took 250,000 lives, was underway. Jeaf started married life stationed on the battlefield tending casualties, while Joan nursed in Perugia.

With Jeaf only allowed leave from the front line for a few days the couple wrote to each other ever day but it was only when war ended in May 1945 that they were able to enjoy time together properly.

A map showing Joan Lockyear's travels

By the time war ended they had been away four years and four months without returning home and Jeaf could not find a job in Wales, where his family had lived for centuries and his own father Lesley Brewer had worked as a doctor .

Eventually the couple settled in Cornwall where Jeaf got a job as a GP in St Just and settled into civilian life, rarely speaking about the war.

It was only when youngest daughter Rosie Tobin found the diaries after her mother died in 2009 that their adventures came to light. Her mother and father, who died in the 1970s, had told Rosie little more than that “there was a lot of sand in the desert”.

“I knew my parents had been in Egypt and Italy during Second World War. but had no idea, until I read her forbidden diaries, how dangerous, challenging and life-changing the experience had been for them, and many others,” retired nurse Rosie, 61, said.

“Reading these diaries was a revelation to me, and made me see my parents in a very different light. In 1941, they were both 24, newly qualified, and had never been abroad or far from home before.

"At that time, the war was going badly for the Allies, and the troops on their convoy did not know where they were going, or when or if they would return.”

Since finding the diaries Rosie has transcribed them, verbatim into a book. The book, Cairo to Perugia, also contains photographs, letters, insights, notes and articles from the 58th General Hospital’s news sheet, The Odyssey.

“The diaries show it was difficult and traumatic but there were times they had fun when they weren’t working,” said Rosie.